Have you been watching America:
The Story of Us on the History
Channel? It is a magnificent
series that emphasizes the experiences of ordinary people. During their segment on World War II, I
heard an interesting line: “In the
first sixteen and a half months of the war, twelve thousand military men die,
but sixty-four thousand American workers die through accidents.”
The narrator did not
speculate on how many of the military deaths were accidents. In fact the pictures reinforced the
stereotype that all military deaths are due to enemy action. It is simply not true.
The famous non-fiction book, Friendly
Fire, described the anguished search by an Iowa couple to learn
the truth of how their son was killed in Vietnam. As I recall, the questioning began when the mother insisted
on seeing her son’s wounds, apparently having assumed they would be
horrific. There was only one tiny
hole in his torso. In the end, the
author found that Michael Mullen had been in the field on an operation, and
because of the heat and humidity in Vietnam, had taken off his flak jacket to
go to sleep. An American artillery
unit some distance away did not take the height of the trees into account when
they fired. A shell exploded in
the treetops above the sleeping men and a single piece of shrapnel killed
Mullen.
During that time, Department
of Defense records showed that more service men and women died in Vietnam in
vehicle accidents alone than were killed in action. Michael Mullen was not alone.
While I was in Army basic
training, two recruits went onto the rifle range during the night or early
morning hours and hid behind the targets.
They could not have failed to hear the loudspeaker instructions to the
soldiers on the firing line.
Suicides have always been a part of military life and death.
I was stationed at Presidio
San Francisco. The post had a large
stockade. One of the prisoners
there had serious psychological/emotional problems, and was taking Army
prescribed medication. Or, he had
been taking it until arriving at the stockade. His medication was denied him and the prisoner descended
into noticeable distress. One day
on work detail, he approached a guard with a shotgun and asked what the guard
would do if he ran away. The guard
answered that he would shoot the prisoner. Not long afterward, the depressed prisoner ran and the guard
killed him.
My unit was the 30th
Military Police Battalion. We
carried .45 pistols on duty. The
normal way of preparing the .45 to fire was to insert a magazine into the grip,
and then, by tightly gripping the steel slide, pull it to the rear and release. A strong spring snaps the slide back to normal and
the mechanism pulls a bullet from the top of the magazine into firing position. One of my colleagues had seen someone
slap the slide hard enough to chamber a round and thought that it looked
cool. So, after checking out his
pistol from the armory, he got on the bus to the MP station with the rest of his
shift and tried out the trick. It
didn’t work the way he planned.
The young soldier blew a hole through the center of his hand large
enough to drop a pencil through, and if the seat in front of him had not been
empty, he could have killed someone else.
Later, during my eight years
with the Veterans Administration, I heard a lot of stories about injuries and
deaths. Very few of them involved
combat. There was the black
soldier whose hitch was up and received his discharge from a fort in
Texas. He left the base wearing
his uniform and somebody shot him to death on the road.
There was the Hispanic vet
who had been in the Navy. During
one tour of sea duty several Hispanic sailors had disappeared from his
ship. Jumping overboard is
apparently a common way that sailors commit suicide. That’s what everyone assumed happened to the missing seamen. Then, a large white sailor grabbed the
vet that I spoke to and threw him over the side. Fortunately, he was able to grab onto something (I forget
what—a rope or chain or whatever it is that hangs over the sides of
ships). He hung there, dangling
over the ocean shouting for help.
His assailant was eventually convicted of attempted murder, but was not
charged in the probable murder of the other sailors.
My point is not to say that
the dead we honor on Memorial Day did not die as heroes. Most of them didn’t—not in the
conventional way. What I want to
emphasize is that they went to do dangerous work on our behalf. Of the millions who served, only a few
charged up hillsides to attack machine gun nests, or flew in aerial dogfights,
but the rest were there. Crime
victims and accident victims, they were away from home in the service of their
country and their wounds—their illnesses—were a consequence of that
service. Memorial Day should not
be a time to remember Hollywood pyrotechnics. Service men and women are flesh-and-blood human beings with
faults and lapses of judgment who give their energy, their work, their bodies
and their lives for people they don’t even know. They do it for us.
If anyone reads this who is
currently in the military, I have one last remembrance for you. A young widow called me one day while I
was working the phone bank at the VA.
She had just received a letter denying her benefits. I could hear the strain in her voice
and a baby in the background. She
needed those benefits. I asked
what reason was given for the denial. “Willful
misconduct.” She asked what that
meant. Her husband had been on
active duty and he was killed on base.
I asked how he had died. “He was in a motorcycle accident.” I took a deep breath because I knew
just what had happened and that this woman and her child were not going to
receive any medical benefits, or monthly checks, or educational assistance. Now, I had to tell her. “Willful misconduct means that he was
doing something that he should have known not to do. In this case—“
I decided to go with the least likely scenario first as if that would
soften the blow. “—if he had
stolen the motorcycle, or—“ I felt
a lump come to my throat. “—if he
had been driving drunk.”
The other end of the line
went silent—proof that I had guessed right. The baby still fussed in the background. Finally, in a cracking voice, the
woman, managed to say, “Thank you.”
As she hung up, I cursed the son-of-a-bitch who had been so selfish and
left his family with nothing.
After all these years, he is
still one of a specific few military dead that I exclude from my prayers. May God bless the rest.